Shepherd's oral narrative style was a precursor to that used by Spalding Gray and Garrison Keillor. Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media wrote that Shepherd "regards radio as a new medium for a new kind of novel that he writes nightly." In the Seinfeld season-six DVD set, commenting on the episode titled "The Gymnast", Jerry Seinfeld said, "He really formed my entire comedic sensibility—I learned how to do comedy from Jean Shepherd."...
Shepherd was an influence on Bill Griffith's Zippy comic strip, as Griffith noted in his strip for January 9, 2000. Griffith explained, "The inspiration—just plucking random memories from my childhood, as I'm wont to do in my Sunday strip (also a way to expand beyond Zippy)—and Shep was a big part of them."
In an interview with New York magazine, Steely Dan's Donald Fagen says that the eponymous figure from his solo album The Nightfly was based on Jean Shepherd.
Though he primarily spent his radio career playing music, New York Top-40 DJ Dan Ingram has acknowledged Shepherd's style as an influence. An article he wrote for the March–April 1957 issue of MAD, "The Night People vs Creeping Meatballism", described the differences between what he considered to be "day people" (conformists) and "night people" (nonconformists).
A few days ago, in conversation on Facebook, I reconsidered my lifelong policy of averting my eyes from the film version of "A Christmas Story." Just to present my own comments:
I've never seen "A Christmas Story" because I am too devoted to Jean Shepherd and the original story as told over the radio....
I know [you hear Shepherd's voice-over narration in the film], but I don't want to see the ideal replaced by a literal acting-out of the story by human actors. The adult's voice creates the kid feeling. I don't want to see a real boy acting out the emotions for the camera. It's radio, the ultimate in radio, and not film...
I think I need to change my position. "A Christmas Story" is a deviation from Shepherd's usual show, because he was reading a story — not riffing in real time — that had been published in a book and a magazine (Playboy). So it wasn't the pure radio ideal that I'm so staunch about. It is not one of his stories about his own youth, because he says before reading the story that the boy is *not* him.
So did I finally watch the movie? No. Not yet, anyway. But I was motivated to listen to a random old show — something about midwestern drug stores. Nothing to do with Christmas, but I was listening on Christmas.
I don't think of Shepherd as Christmas-y, and it annoys me a bit that so many people do. The radio show should be much more important that that one film version of a story he used to read on the radio. Should be, and perhaps is, as its influence is deeply woven into many things we actively enjoy today. It's baked into this blog.
Here's the podcast where I found my random old show yesterday. Here's a webpage with a lot of the old shows.
Posts
59 comments:
Until today, I’d never heard of Jean Shepard.
At first I thought Ann got the gender wrong, but then I realized it was his parents who made the mistake.
One of my daughter’s HS classmates named her son Aquinas. Her maiden name was Hamburger.
Just listened. Wondering if Rush Limbaugh was influenced by Jean Shepherd.
There was a morning DJ named Jack Bogut who owned Pittsburgh and the surrounding region, told stories of his youth in Montana.
Patrick McManus did the same of his youth in Idaho, in short stories.
"At first I thought Ann got the gender wrong, but then I realized it was his parents who made the mistake."
He was Jean Shepherd Jr. — his father was the senior, so if anyone made a "mistake," it was the grandparents. But "Jean" is a very common name for men in French-speaking places.
@Rory
Take a look at some of the Jean Shepherd stories that are NOT about boyhood life. That's what's more innovative.
Sometimes Shepherd would go on about the "blue-haired ladies" who complained about the shows that were not about boyhood life.
The show I listened to yesterday was about the differences in drug stores in different parts of the country.
I have 409 shows (by date) archived on the HD, culled from a WBAI show that aired whatever he could find, around 2005. Two 50s, mostly 60s, then early 70s.
Sadly, the SJWs are seeking to cancel A Christmas Story over that scene in the Chinese restaurant.
The sanctimonious ruin everything they touch.
One of the shows, not one I have archived I think, was about being stuck in the wrong gender health class in junion high school.
"All right!" the women's health instructor said, dissmissing the wrong gender problem as the office's problem and not hers, and went on with the class. Fuck em.
WBAI ran out of money and fired the guy, and thus ended the collecting of old shows.
IMO, it is a mistake to give a child a gender ambiguous name e.g. Lynn, Gail, etc.
Go ahead and hate on me.
A few points for the potential benefit of our host.
The movie is heavily narrated by Jean. It isn’t just a kid actor.
It includes a lot of other stories or characters that Jean talked about. Examples include the Bumpus dogs, the fight with Scott Farkas, and the time his buddy Flick (or was it Swartz, I can’t remember) stuck his tongue on the frozen flag pole at school playground.
But I agree, if you heard the stories and the show each night, as I did on WOR radio (provided a kid names Marv Albert wasn’t calling the Nicks or Ranger game), the adult actors don’t really capture the characters as Jean described them.
Still it is great to hear Jean’s voice in the movie.
(I’m not sure you could reproduce the show now. Can you even say the words Jew’s Harp? )
Jean was in the movie as the man telling Ralphie and Randy that the line to see Santa at Higbee’s started “back there”.
I know nothing of Jean Shepherd and his storytelling except one story that appeared in a ninth-grade anthology I was teaching from one year. Its title, “The Endless Streetcar Ride Into the Night and the Tinfoil Noose” captures a bit of the Shepherd style and humor but what arrested me about that story was the epiphany moment the narrator has when he discovers he, not the gorgeous girl he is sitting beside, is the blind date. All along he assumed he was doing some pitiable girl a favor by agreeing to it. But then he realizes, he’s the one they all pity.
A truly great story. Like many of the short stories I taught, it has stayed with me my entire life. Plays are good, novels fine, and poems interesting, but short stories changed my life.
Archive.org has 232 Jean Shepherd "audio" entries, probably with many duplicates.
Back in the early 60s I listened to Shepherd every night. Then when I went away to college at Madison, I bought a super AM radio with hopes of receiving WOR. It never worked.
(I’m not sure you could reproduce the show now. Can you even say the words Jew’s Harp? )
I would go with the more acceptable term "mouth organ."
One of my buddies in college had never eaten a hamburger. It started out as just a quirk of his parents' cooking, but by the time he was in high school and could get a burger by his own choice it just sort of became his "thing". Despite the fact he acknowledged it might taste delicious, he was happier being the guy who never ate a burger. It's sort of akin to the sour grapes.
This is one of the things that keeps me coming back to Althouse every day, as I have done since the "How Kerry Lost Me" post... the serendipity. M Jordan, I read that blind date story in a grade school reading book decades ago, and have wondered off and on about how to find it again. For Christmas I got a nice pair of earbuds and have been planning to search out some pleasant listening options for the long morning walks i am planning to start taking, as a way to work off all the extra pandemic wine, and partly inspired by Ann's daily pictures. I love Jean Shepherd's narration in "A Christmas Story" and am looking forward to some enjoyable listening thanks to the link.
I don't know about the Donald Fagen interview but I do know Fagen wrote a great appreciation essay about Shepherd and about the hazard of meeting your heroes in real life. I also know tat Shepherd is the voice of the father on he Carousel of Progress ride at Disney world.
IMO, it is a mistake to give a child a gender ambiguous name e.g. Lynn, Gail, etc.
Like Lynn Swann and Gale Sayers?
A Christmas Story is one of those movies people see in bits and pieces through the years. I saw it once all the way through and wasn't impressed, maybe because I was familiar with so much of it, or maybe just because it wasn't my thing. You had to get through the nostalgic sugarcoating and your own feelings about 70s/80s made for TV movies and to get to the story.
FuseTV, a Canadian-owned MTV wannabe channel would show the '90s teen flick Empire Records every week or so for what seemed like years. It was nice to pop in and see what the kids were up to. It was like actually hanging out in the store or visiting friends. When I finally watched the whole thing straight through, yeah, it wasn't that good.
In the early 1970s a fellow high school student in Jacksonville, Florida, was able to tune in Shepherd's WOR broadcasts occasionally and record them on cassette. He circulated these staticky recordings among a handful of his friends, so even in heathen Jacksonville we got to listen from time to time. We all read the story collections, "In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash" and "Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories and Other Disasters" (and the later, lesser, "The Ferrari in the Bedroom"). I remember him as an excellent writer, superb at evoking the place in which he grew up and what it felt like to be a teenaged boy, but I haven't re-read him in years and I'm almost afraid to, for fear of discovering that he wasn't as good as memory insists. I'd love for him to be rediscovered by the larger public, but I'd also love for Robert Benchley to be rediscovered by the larger public - Dave Barry and Johnny Carson have both mentioned what a formative influence he was - and I don't see that happening for either one of them anytime soon.
Just before Christmas Story, Jean Shepherd made a lower budget film for PBS, much of it filmed in the neighborhood I grew up in.
With many of the same family themes, the climax was when the town drunk, Lud Kissel, launched a firework that chased everyone around the neighborhood and blew up a porch with Mrs. Kissel on it (scene cued below).
The Great American 4th of July and Other Diasters
Shepherd picked the neighborhood outside WGBH studios because it reminded him of his Indiana home. Something of a trial run for Christmas Story, but wasn't nearly as well produced.
For a while Shepherd did live Saturday night shows from the Village Vanguard. These were not his best work, and he did not handle hecklers well.
Benchley's been copied and updated so much that I think he's become something of a museum piece. His acting roles are still fresh, though.
"My old man believed in God.
He figured that something as good as beer couldn't have just happened by accident."
Flicklives.com is a tribute site that's been going for twenty years. It looks like it may contain a lot of Shepherd's material.
I was surprised to learn that he published an essay in MAD magazine in the fifties: "The Night People vs Creeping Meatballism." Who knew that Mad magazine actually used to publish essays, interviews and contributions from celebrities, rather than just gags and parodies? Somebody reads from the article online and tiny facsimile pages are also available, but it would be nice to read the text.
I have enjoyed the movie since it first came out. I grew up in Cleveland and our neighborhood around E49 th street was very similar to that where Ralphie’s house was on W11th. In the 60s we used to go downtown to Higbee’s and to Halle’s department stores to shop and walk around public square to see the store display windows and lights. All locations in the film. Higbee’s had the escalators with wooden steps. Childhood memories for me that get visualized in the film. Halle’s had Mr Jingaling where you give him you list to Santa. It was a Cleveland thing I think in the 60s and not in the movie.
I have watched A Christmas Story every year since I was a young girl. I knew the movie was from a short story but I had no idea that Jean Shepherd was the narrator or that he had other things besides that one story. I'm excited to listen to some of these shows.
I know of Jean Shepherd only by name, legend, and the man behind, "A Christmas Story". But I've not listened to any of his old shows. But based on the blog post and the comments I'm looking forward to listening to these tales and how he presents them. The comments about him remind me of reading James Thurber, who's tales of his childhood, family, dog, and strangers in Columbus, OH always made me smile (as did his drawings). I look at my own terrier and see a Thurber dog. Thurber Dog
Thanks for getting us on to Jean Shepherd. I went digging looking for this and found it. If you were a band kid, perhaps you need to go listen to it. What we don't know is that later, Ralphie (Jean Shepherd) was a band kid. A tuba-playing band kid. Then, he had his own radio program on WOR radio in Chicago. For years. Here's a recording of Ralphie's marching band memories broadcast Memorial Day, 1967. I wish the ninth-grade me had heard this then.
You have about twenty minutes for this. Apologies to the ladies, but this is what you just spent your whole lives fighting against as well. You'll see what I mean. It has been a lousy year. This story is about turning disaster into triumph, while enduring physical distress along the way.
I wish you all a New and Improved year in 2021.
https://youtu.be/ES7CaHdUdDM?t=1151
At first I thought Ann got the gender wrong, but then I realized it was his parents who made the mistake.
I felt this. It was the second time in a week. The first time was the post mentioning Gale Ridge, the entomologist. I expect that spelling to indicate a man (Gale Sayers, Gale Gordon) and for "Gail" to be used for girls.
@Cath
Here’s a link to an online version of the text. It’s part of a class assignment or something but the whole story’s there.
https://studylib.net/doc/8021129/the-endless-streetcar-ride-into-the-night--and-the-tinfoi...
I was a big Jean Shepherd fan until he grew increasingly bitter and something of a Debbie Downer. There was a good article about Shep by Donald Fagen in Slate, if you want to look it up. I am often reminded of something he said that anticipated the PC agitprop "court jesters" of the current age: "Satire isn't just about making fun of people you disagree with."
When Jean Shepherd was born, back in the 1920s, the Midwest was coming into its own culturally: Cather, Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Hemingway, Fitzgerald. You could think of Shepherd as a belated part of that movement or renaissance. By the time he passed away in the 1990s, what was left? Garrison Keillor and the Coen brothers? The region had been assimilated into a larger national culture, and writers who retain a Middle American sensibility are Westerners and others who might have gotten an MFA from U Iowa.
When Shepherd was alive the country was more united than we are today. People who made it in the entertainment world of New York or Los Angeles were Depression kids from Middle America (when they weren't Depression Kids from the Lower East Side or Brooklyn) and they brought the coast and the hinterlands together. Johnny Carson, for example: Hollywood bigshot with his four wives, and Nebraska farmboy. Fame and money undid a lot of the successful (Jean Shepherd himself in some ways), but back then there was more of a connection between the two Americas.
P.S. His first name isn't such a big deal. It's remembering how to spell his last name right every time that makes trouble.
Memories. Shepherd gave a talk to the student body of City College of NY in about 1958 and I still remember his description of West Point cadets as men "shaped like bullets".
His paean to his father's love of BEEEEER was the best.
I first found Jean Shepard in Car and Driver magazine where he had a monthly column for years. He always worked a mention of a car into it, somewhere but they were rarely about cars. The one that really stuck with me was about driving through Maine late at night listening to baseball on the radio. His column was almost always the highlight of the magazine but Car and Driver in the 70's was an amazing magazine. It hasn't aged that well. Apparently you can't replace David E. Davis, Brock Yates and Jean Shepard. No surprise there.
So as a writer, is he like Bill Bryson when he talks about small town Iowa or New Hampshire?
“A few points for the potential benefit of our host. The movie is heavily narrated by Jean. It isn’t just a kid actor. “
As I note in the post!
“It includes a lot of other stories or characters that Jean talked about. Examples include the Bumpus dogs, the fight with Scott Farkas, and the time his buddy Flick (or was it Swartz, I can’t remember) stuck his tongue on the frozen flag pole at school playground. “
I know and this is a negative. It’s mixing things up.
I'm one of those people that never watched the movie in it's entirety. It was on last night and though I missed the first twenty minutes, watched the balance and enjoyed it. Thanks to Lurkers comment, I looked up Mr. Shepherds wiki; I had no idea of his other work. I guess his show didn't make it into the Pittsburgh market, or perhaps I was listening to Dr. Demento.
I adore Jean Shepherd and all his books. PBS did a wonderful version of "The Great American 4th of July and Other Disasters" years ago. And reading "Wand Hickey's Night of Golden Memories" is to walk back into not only MY childhood but my father's as well. Brilliant stuff.
https://www.paleycenter.org/collection/item/?q=john&p=777&item=T85:0973
Another remark from hepherd I have thought of over the years concerns The Slob, Shep's favorite term for your average unlettered, uncultured Joe Blow. Nowadays we might call him The Deplorable. In making fun of The Slob, Shepherd cautioned against over-valuing his opposite, The Intellectual, whose track record, Shep asserted, was nothing to brag about. He pointed out that Hitler was--at least at first--praised by leading intellectuals of the time and place, led by Goebbels, who held a doctorate in philology. Whereas if you attended a Hitler rally, you would probably find some Slob in the back making fun of Der Fuhrer. "Hey, look at that clown with the funny little mustache!"
'The Nightfly' is a terrific album, especially late at night after 'excessive' consumption (pick your poison).
Sounds like Shepherd was a precursor to Keillor, but not a pretentious asshole.
Good to know.
Other than the movie, Jean Shepherd's work is almost totally unknown to me, and will probably remain so, esteemed Prof's and commenters' enthusiasm aside.
The movie is funny enough a few times, but it's too much a cult fave for me.
For that matter, I don't even like radio talk that much--Keillor at his best was superb, but if his shows hadn't included a lot of music I wouldn't have tuned in so regularly.
Narr
Hard to please
https://youtu.be/j71oGYFGYcQ
"A Christmas Story" at 1/12 speed ("Oh, fudge!" scene)
It's mesmerizing. Like a combination of "Koyaanisqatsi," a spacewalk and a Bergman movie.
A five-second clip takes 60 seconds.
Shepherd also had public TV shows Shepherd's Pie and Jean Shepherd's America.
Glad to see a Jean Shepherd radio show link to archive.org was already posted. And a search for "Jean Shepherd radio broadcasts" will turn up a number of active radio archive sites with more 50s & early 60s archived for download.
I heard him on WOR as a kid thanks to my ham radio op & DX'er much older half-brother, Even tho we lived 500 miles south in Raleigh, his awesome antenna setup pulled in AM stations all over the eastern & central US.
Here's Kiellor at his best, a long time ago. It almost makes me miss Minnesota. Almost. Bruno the Fishing Dog
For those who like Shepherd & Kiellor, you might consider checking out Welcome To Night Vale, which is the same kind of thing, except from a town HP Lovecraft might have grown up in.. Funny, sometimes touching, sometimes harrowing.
The podcasts are free.
Because of Andre Norton, I always thought "Andre" was a woman's name..
It's a delightful movie, Althouse. If you give it a decent chance you never know what will happen next.
“And what happened then? Well, in Whoville they say that the Grinch's small heart grew three sizes that day.”
Blogger Lurker21 said...
When Jean Shepherd was born, back in the 1920s, the Midwest was coming into its own culturally: Cather, Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Hemingway, Fitzgerald. You could think of Shepherd as a belated part of that movement or renaissance. By the time he passed away in the 1990s, what was left? Garrison Keillor and the Coen brothers? The region had been assimilated into a larger national culture, and writers who retain a Middle American sensibility are Westerners and others who might have gotten an MFA from U Iowa.
I'd add George Ade of Indiana to that list. Shepherd frequently acknowledged Ade's "Fables in Slang" as a major influence on him. He even edited and introduced a volume of Ade's writings titled "The America of George Ade." A sample of one of the "Fables in Slang" can be found at:
https://www.sleuthsayers.org/search/label/Jean%20Shepherd
The more or less complete works of George Ade are available gratis at Gutenberg.org.
Blogger Churchy LaFemme: said...
"Because of Andre Norton, I always thought "Andre" was a woman's name.."
It is, but preferably spelled "Andree" with the accent over the first e. Male and female versions. Kind of like "blond" and "blonde".
I am a huge fan of old radio shows so I'm going to investigate Jean Shepherd. I am also one who has not seen the movie except for TV adverts indicating what day/time the film was to be aired. On Christmas Eve I was prowling around online listening to Christmas themed Jack Benny shows while I was baking cookies. Always hilarious.
Texas singer Ray Wylie Hubbard wrote of the Day People and the Night People, noting that "it's the job of the Night People to take the Day People's money."
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